She never planted them, and now I knew she had lied that day. Indigo had always known how Koschei had separated his soul from his body and drawn out his death as if it were a pin holding cloth in place. She knew because she had done the same thing.
Inside the Room of Secrets, I smoothed down my tie, glanced at the gold-and-crystal clock that stood beside a dead, snarling black bear. The clock read fifteen minutes before dinner. I waited for Indigo. This would be the last time I waited for her.
The staff had left once dinner was prepared, and the House was empty. Normally, the cook informed me, they would have stayed to clear up after the meal, but considering it was a final feast in honor of the nearly deceased, Indigo had told her the dishes could wait for morning. I pictured Hippolyta in her great bed. I wondered if she could still see the blinking lights of the machines surrounding her. I hoped she mistook them for stars.
While I waited for my wife, I surveyed the Room of Secrets. It appeared restrained. The shadows neatly pinned beneath the preserved faces of roe bucks and oryxes, hares and bison. Opposite the shadows, candlelight lacquered the femurs, fangs, and bleached mandibles.
On the table lay a final feast—a haunch of roasted venison stewed in its juices, flanked with plums and sour cherries. Blue-veined and moon-white rinds of cheese stood in towers besidebowls of fruit. Several glass decanters of garnet-red and honey-pale wines sweated beads of quartz.
Soon, Indigo and I would play our final game.
What happens next?I wanted to ask the House, but it was silent, so silent that it hid Indigo’s footsteps on the carpet until she was almost directly in front of me.
“Is it wrong that death gives me such an appetite?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m starving.”
This was the truth. I was starving to be at an end of something.
“How are you?” I asked, and immediately regretted the empty platitude.
Indigo raised an eyebrow and spared me an imperious glance. She wore a black, feathered gown with a high, funereal neck. It looked less like a dress and more like a pair of great wings folded against her body. Her hair was shiny, pulled away from her face. If she was crying as her aunt died, there was no evidence on her smoothly arranged features.
“I am tired,” she said.
We beheld each other. I didn’t know Indigo, and yet I loved her in spite of this. Or perhaps because of it. In the unknown of our marriage, I became known to myself and that was an incarnation of love too.
For the first half hour, we ate in near silence. She hardly looked up from her plate. Indigo was not focused on her meal so much as she was avoiding being the focus of something else.
Behind her, a stag’s face swiveled in our direction. The shadows of its antlers were vast and oddly mobile, as if poured onto the walls in thick, black syrup. The room had come alive. It was time.
I wiped my hands and leaned forward. “I figured that tonight you would be in need of a distraction. I thought we could play a game.”
“A game?” asked Indigo, looking up from her plate. Her voice was careful, strained by her eagerness. I was reminded, anew, of how Indigo moved through the world with the infinite precision of one who knows that she can break it with a well-placed heel. “What kind of game?”
“Your favorite kind,” I said. “One with a story and a bit of a sacrifice, where the key to winning is nothing but restraint.”
Indigo’s face stayed blank. “What are the rules?”
“I will tell you a fairy tale, and you must listen. No sound can escape your lips. No emotion can ghost across your face.”
Something playful touched the corner of her mouth. We have played games like this our whole marriage. Games of touch where a sigh was punished with a kiss, and even the loser delighted in defeat. Indigo was always better at those games. I was always hungry to touch her, too eager to lose.
“And if I do?” she asked.
“If you do, then you must tell me where you keep your secrets.”
She could walk away. She could refuse me. But instead, she sat still and held my gaze. She twisted her wedding ring, a plain band of iron.
“You lied,” she said mildly. “You told me you could live without knowing. You made a vow.”
“It was not a lie,” I said. “And it was a vow I intended to keep to a woman, not a bride made of flowers, no matter how lovely I find her.”
No matter how much I have come to love you.
I could tell the barb landed by the sudden tightness around Indigo’s mouth. She didn’t flinch though. She nodded with an air of reluctant approval. We had made a world for ourselves, and even as I set out to destroy it, I would honor its rules.
“Then let’s play your game, husband,” she said, reaching for her wineglass. “Begin your tale.”
